Wow, that was a lame title, but let’s do it. Talk about text, that is. More specifically, let’s talk about the Typography. Let’s start with Typography’s ancestor, Cuneiform. If you think back to your middle school days or to those world history classes in high school that name probably rings a bell. To review let’s remember that Cuneiform was used by the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia sometime about 3100 BC. It looked something like this:
cool rock. cool pictures. the pictures mean beer. nice.
The writing was invented for the same reason anything is invented ever: to make life easier and money. The initial use of the tablet was to keep track of trade such as livestock and beer. So thanks, Sumerians, for revolutionizing modern communication in the name of a cold one.
Next chapter, we move ahead to the ancient Egyptians.
The Egyptians were pretty great at creating things that confused and bemused the White Men™ of the 17th century trying to understand what those giant triangles and half lion half man thing were doing in the middle of the desert. The one thing that truly baffled them more than the geometric sandcastles, was the writing inside of the sandcastles. The writing was you guessed it, Hieroglyphs which looked something like this:
cooler rock. cooler pictures.
What’s neat about these pictures is that they could also be used to make a syllabary, meaning that the pictures could each represent a different syllable and by drawn side by side to spell a word. I think that’s probably the coolest thing I’ve heard in a while. But the White Men™ weren’t able to figure it out until they got the Rosetta Stone, which translated the Hieroglyphs to Greek which they could understand. Eurocentrism, kids, but we’ll leave that for another day.
And so the writing was evolved from the Hieroglyphs to eventually the ABCs we have today allowing you to read these word. Dope. These 26 lovely letters evolved from The Phoenicians who were the first alphabet havers. Yes, I realize I am skipping ahead, but this is a blog post we gotta speed things up here. Then a little more time passes (I’m talking grand scheme of things time wise) and the Greeks brings us the vowel, building off of what the Phoenicians gave us. Then the Etruscans arrive in Greece and “borrow” some cool art things and the Greek alphabet, which the finally evolves the Latin alphabet (exlcluding J, U, and W) thanks to the Romans taking over pretty much everything. And that’s the story of the ABCs.
